Will we become isolated consumer units, locked in communion with our home entertainment hubs? Photograph: Martin Godwin

If one of the defining features of modern film-going is the ever-narrowing range of fare on offer theatrically, might tomorrow's movie-lovers become smitten without ever stepping inside a cinema? That was the thought which struck me this week after reading Andrew O'Hehir's latest post at his recently bloggified Salon column Beyond the Multiplex, in which he could be found reeling under a deluge of fascinating and exotic new DVDs.

Having put out an open call for left-of-mainstream discs when starting up the blog, O'Hehir has been aghast at the scale of the response. And among the delights of, for example, Vegan Cooking For Animal Lovers ("I haven't watched that," he confesses, "but one recipe is entitled 'When Spud Gets Off Heroin This Is The Potato Salad He Will Eat'"), are some of the most enticing oddments any film-lover could wish for, all gathered up in just the last few weeks - the second series of Lars von Trier's unhinged Danish TV ghost opera The Kingdom; Criterion's new Agnès Varda box set; Alix Lambert's portrait of Russian prison tattoo sub-culture, The Mark of Cain (the ideal companion piece to Eastern Promises); a collection devoted to near-forgotten 20s comic Harry Langdon; another to the post-war British documentary movement Free Cinema.

And so on. Now there are, of course, too many examples of important titles still unavailable pretty much anywhere - but for the most part, anyone looking to immerse themselves in the deeper waters of film enthusiasm would have a long old soak on DVD before they ran out of options. While O'Hehir's sample is made up of American releases, between the multi-region player and the UK's own market, the British cinephile is allowed access to a selection of curios and rediscovered classics so broad it renders irrelevant the limitations of multiplex booking policy, giving them license to explore at home, forever free of the wafting aroma of stale £4 nachos.

Perfect - almost. The problem is that there's a profound difference between watching a movie at the pictures and a DVD in your living room, and in the era of gargantuan home cinemas it's not always due to the issues of screen size or sound quality. Cue this fine post from Pullquote on the decline of the repertory cinema, and how the experience of watching movies can be made immeasurably poorer by the lack of that much-maligned accessory: a fellow audience.

Now, as someone whose knuckles whiten at a whisper 10 rows behind me during the opening credits, you don't need to tell me about the hazardous nature of other people at the movies. And yet without them, something significant seems to be lost from the whole experience. Cinema, after all, was always designed as a group activity - and now, as ever, much of its strange hold over the imagination depends on the collective intake of breath, 200 people's laughter in the darkness, the physical and psychic sense of participation in something bigger than your own individual ponderings.

But much as the iPod has helped cement music's place as a strictly private pleasure (about which Owen Hatherley writes at Sit Down Man, You're A Bloody Tragedy), so the treasure trove of DVD takes with it the last sense of a movie as a live and collective event. Instead, we're left as isolated consumer units, locked in communion with our home entertainment hubs like a million techno Gloria Swansons in Sunset Boulevard, staring at old pictures in our own hermetic screening rooms. And if that's the shape of things to come, then maybe the scent of stale nachos isn't so terrible after all.